[norvig]

I worked with Margaret and Saydeen at Higher Order Software for my first job out of college, but I didn't get to work on anything as glamorous as Apollo. We did mostly government contracts; I was there for two years before I decided it was time for grad school.

[carapace]

Is HOS what it seems? I read about it years ago in "System Design from Provably Correct Constructs". It seems like it should revolutionize software development (and incidentally put most programmers out of business) but that it somehow just never gets "traction" beyond certain markets/customers?

[CurtMonash]

The first time -- and still one of the few times -- I ever walked out of a meeting because the BS level seemed too high was when I visited Higher Order Software in the 1980s.

[yourapostasy]

Can you please share details of what caused you to walk out? There is a lot of curiosity around USL and the toolchain she and her team have built, but my Google-fu has failed to come up with descriptions of practical experience with them. I'm struggling to decipher how different it is from UML, or what it is solving that functional approaches are not already working to address.

[CurtMonash]

It was 30ish years ago, so I don't recall details. But it seemed overhyped. The usual problem with tools that do a great job of generate code is that they do a great job of generating CERTAIN KINDS of code, but are unhelpful or even counterproductive with other parts of your development task. Certainly this was true in the 1980s, and back then the problem was exacerbated in that there weren't graceful ways to combine what was generated with what you had to write or modify by hand.

[carapace]

Okay but was it BS, or did it just sound like BS and actually it's important and useful (if a bit rough and early)? That's my main curiosity.

[neilxdsouza]

OT: I just said to myself, that cannot be "the Peter Norvig" here on Hackernews and I checked the profile. And Lo and behold ...